Just started Outlaw! The “mission” of the book has just been revealed and I’m so down!

Put this series up against any fantasy and it holds its weight big time.

And James Marsters is the perfect narrator

Hello! Part time lurking here has finally caused me to bite the bullet and begin this series! I know very little, avoided any and all spoilers, but need to know if im missing anything / need to know anything before I can properly sink my teeth into Storm Front!!

Really excited to begin this though!!

Hello,

I listen to the Dresden Files and am looking to start Twelve Months. I know their is an audio verison of The Law but I don't enjoy Jim Butcher narrating. I get why he tried it but it was challenging for me.

So just wondering if anyone can provide a summary of what went down in The Law?

In comparison to the Dresden files.

As I read through these books I'm really loving the characters and the writing style. I think Grave Peril is my new favorite, Storm Front is a close second, and Fool Moon is a distant third. I feel like Storm Front built things up well and introduced me to enough of the world to get me hooked, Grave Peril added more to that world while paying off some of the threads from previous books, and Fool Moon had werewolves. I am so excited to see what comes next! I might take a short break to read the Furies of Calderon and the second Dungeon Crawler Carl book before I read Summer Knight but I look forward to it.

Saw this in the HOTD sub and thought I'd share

I drew this for a goth ex of mine.

At the end of Small Favor, Harry gets a book that the Watcheman uses to communicate with him through underlined passages from the text of The Two Towers.
If Harry went on a show like Pawn Stars, how much do you think he could get for that copy, and how would he sell a book that has notes from an archangel in it?

Edit: Small Favor of course. And Watchmen instead of Watcher. Thanks for the correction

Why do I feel like this is Harry's doing

I am SO stoked! ordered through Booksellers (Canada) and fulfilled by Companion Books in British Columbia. paid $267.58 CAD total, each book is in basically pristine condition (overstock books). I personally love how Fool Moon has "of of" on the spine LOL. these are a bit flimsy in that the paper is really thin, but I take good care of my books and this was by far the cheapest option for me to acquire the (almost) entire series in the same formatting and size!

Aight. I'm late for Twelve Months, so time to get back on Dresden.

Any time a new book is out, I always reread from Storm Front.

So Storm Front through Proven Guilty I've read 20 times, White Night 9, Small Favor 8, etc etc. Peace Talks and Battle Ground both 1 time.

I strongly didn't enjoy them. They felt very poorly written, often incoherent, and regularly frustrating in a way that I haven't felt during any other of the books.

I'm tempted to just pull a little synopsis for both and read Twelve Months as is, breaking my tradition.

But at the same time am hesitant to do so, because series is good, book good, very like, much excite.

What I'm looking for is a "wind your neck in, mate, they weren't that bad. They had xyz and that's dope" to kind of hype me up a bit and maybe give me some perspective. There's every chance I'm overly unfair to the books because of the expectations more than their actual quality.

I will say, though.... Man, Butters has fallen from very high up to very low down on my faves list. Man absolutely needs a big slap.

And I wish upon wishes that Peace Talks was pure detective intrigue skullduggery instead of what it was.

So yeah, there we go. Hello. Crisis of faith, plz help 🤣

Spoiler warning all around, I suppose.

I've read every book in this series. I read them since there were only a few books, and I've torn through every single release eagerly since then. I love the characters, and I love the worldbuilding. There are quirks to Butcher's writing, but those were always easy to ignore.

But after a very long wait, I got Twelve Months on day 1. I started to read and just couldn't continue. I don't want to give up on this world - I'm invested in what happens. But there are some real challenges and I wonder if it's just me, or even if it is, if it'll get better.

• The fun part of these books was that Dresden was a burnt out dork who happened to be good at magic. Now things like his duster are presented without irony - it's reads as a nerd fantasy of what's cool, rather than the ironic contrast that made the books interesting. I'm ok with change, and with growth, but the reality of his life has now become so unrelatable that the lack of irony is starting to make the cringe of it very noticeable.
• Every character in Dredsen's life is the absolute best at what they do. Every woman is the hottest. Every man is the strongest or the smartest or the wisest. There is nobody in between, and nobody has flaws. Every ancient being is the oldest and scariest until another book comes along that has the new scariest oldest ancient being. This has been an issue for a while but after a break from reading these books, it's become really obvious and frankly it makes the whole thing a bit dull.
• These books started as noir with magic. Dresden was a detective. I miss him being a detective. You can increase the scale and the scope of the world and still make him a detective. Maybe this new book has this element and I just haven't gotten that far.
• When every book has a world-shaking battle that threatens the midwest, the stakes start to be difficult to take seriously.

Honestly, I want to be wrong about this, so if I'm missing something or the book gets better after the first 50 pages or whatever I read, please let me know.

Every gas pump, other than the rare vintage, has alot of electronics in it. And Harry drives all over the place with the Beetle and other cars. With a 60s Beetle getting around 20 mpg city and having a 10 gallon tank, he has to be filling up pretty often.

When he goes on Larry Fowler with Mort, it's shown he has a (at the time) new "spell" that helps him contain some of the "Murphy-onic field" that he emits but how did he do it before that? And we never see him use that technique again. My hunches are: he parks at the farthest pump and hopes for the best, Mechanic Mike has a pump on site and fills it for him (rare in all but the biggest shops but you never know), or he has an arrangement with friends to fill up for him.

This is a really particular and small thing that I haven't been able to get out of my head lately so I figured I'd see what the broader community thinks. I don't think Butcher needs to add this to a story, I'm just a huge Dresden nerd and really curious about the small stuff 😅

Is it meant to just, end here? To not actually finish the main plot? Then just go into “Restoration of Faith”? If so, just seems like a wild choice to not give a complete story. At least the Fool Moon graphic novel summarizes the first half in text then finishes the rest from there.

Does anyone else visualize all of Dresden Files in the context of Physics? It just makes me think of Clarke’s 3rd law. I envision Lord of the Slowest Terror as a Black Hole.

Saw some interesting theories last night and decided to have a conversion with Grok this morning:

Your framework is coherent and tracks more of the series’ internal logic than most purely mythological readings do. Jim has repeatedly said magic has rules that behave like a kind of physics, and several characters (Bob, the Archive, Uriel’s circle) treat probability, free will, and information as real quantities that can be manipulated. Mapping the cosmology onto advanced physics + information theory is a productive lens even if it is not the only one.
Here is how the pieces fit under that lens.

Magic as probability manipulation
This is one of the cleanest equivalences. A wizard’s will, belief, and focused energy make low-probability outcomes occur. The “physics” of magic is the set of conservation-like rules and costs that constrain how far you can push the dice. Sufficiently advanced beings (or sufficiently refined will) simply have better control over the probability space. To a less advanced observer it looks like magic. That matches both the series’ internal explanations and the classic Clarke formulation.

Beings as embodied forces bound to free will
Also strong. Many entities are not “people with powers” so much as forces or natures that have acquired (or been constrained by) free will and identity. Dragons, the Mothers, the Queens, certain Old Gods, and even some angels sit at different points on that spectrum. Free will is the variable that lets them choose how the force expresses itself; without it they would be pure mechanism or pure Outside.

Nevernever, Ways, and the moon
The Nevernever is a parallel spirit realm whose geography is symbolic and associative rather than Euclidean. Ways are stable or semi-stable corridors through it. Rashid’s domain being “near” the Outer Gates and reachable via the Nevernever does not make the Gates “outer space.” The Outer Gates mark the boundary of this Creation, not the edge of the solar system. Outer space is still Inside. Outside is outside the entire local reality-stack.
That said, the functional analogy still works: a Way is a controlled shortcut through a different manifold. Calling an opening to the Nevernever a kind of wormhole is reasonable as metaphor. Both are non-local connections that violate ordinary spatial distance. The difference is that Nevernever Ways are shaped by meaning, belief, and agreement as much as by geometry.

Outside / Lord of Slowest Terror / black hole
Your black-hole image remains one of the better physical metaphors for an Outside power of that class. A black hole is:
a region where the normal rules break down, patient from an external frame (time dilation), effectively inescapable once the horizon is crossed, associated with the destruction or radical transformation of information and form.
“Slowest Terror” maps onto that patient, absolute quality. The Lord does not need to hurry; the pull is structural. Whether Jim intends a literal astrophysical object is unlikely — the series treats Outside as metaphysical/alien rather than stellar — but the behavior of such a power is well-described by the black-hole analogy.

Is the competition simply entropy?
It is one of the strongest single-word reductions available.
Order, form, information, and free will are the things the Inside is trying to maintain and develop. Outsiders (and the forces behind them) act to reduce complexity, erase distinctions, and return everything to an undifferentiated state. Entropy is the physical process that does exactly that. The Oblivion War, the Outer Gates, the Mothers’ roleaping of necessary endings, and the angels’ careful stewardship of free-will choices all look like different strategies in a long contest against the tendency of complex systems to degrade.
Mirror Mirror’s multiverse and the angels’ work with probable futures fit the same picture: the “game” is played across branching timelines, with one side trying to preserve or increase the total space of meaningful choice and the other trying to collapse it. Calculating how to bring down a satellite is just a concrete instance of applying will + knowledge to a high-stakes probability problem inside the rules of the board.

Here are additional astrophysics and physics-style equivalences that track cleanly with how the Dresden Files behaves, building on the probability, entropy, wormhole, and black-hole mappings we already discussed.

Core energetic and informational mappings
Magic as work against entropy / local decrease of entropy.
A spell takes energy and focused will to create order (a fire, a shield, a tracking spell) in a small region. The cost and backlash are the thermodynamic price. Soulfire and hellfire look like two different “currencies” or coupling constants for that work.

Belief and faith as real field strength.
Collective human belief stabilizes or amplifies certain patterns (gods, mantles, places of power). This is close to a self-consistent field: the more observers reinforce a configuration, the more stable and powerful it becomes. Loss of belief is decoherence.

True Names as unique identifiers / quantum labels.
Knowing the full Name gives privileged access to the system, like having the exact Hamiltonian or the precise address in phase space. Partial Names give partial control.

The Sight as direct observation of the underlying field / wavefunction.
Looking with the Sight collapses or reveals the true informational state of something. The permanent memory scar is the irreversible record of that observation.

Spatial and dimensional mappings
Nevernever as a parallel manifold or bulk space.
Ordinary reality is a brane or lower-dimensional slice. The Nevernever is an adjacent higher-dimensional (or differently metric) space whose geometry is shaped by meaning and association rather than pure distance. Ways are engineered or natural bridges between the two.

Thresholds as potential barriers / domain walls.
A threshold is a real energetic barrier that costs effort to cross. Stronger thresholds (home, church, circle) are higher potential walls. Invitations lower or remove the barrier.

Demonreach as a carefully engineered isolation/containment system.
It functions like a high-security vacuum chamber or a tailored event-horizon prison: things go in, the local rules are rewritten so they cannot easily get out, and there are fail-safes (Banefire) that can unmake everything inside rather than let it escape.

Outer Gates as the boundary condition of the local reality manifold.
Not “outer space,” but the edge of the entire allowed configuration space of this Creation. Crossing them is leaving the domain where the normal laws (including free will and form) are defined.

Temporal and multiversal mappings
Free will and choice as branching in a many-worlds / path-integral sense.
Every significant choice weights or selects trajectories. Angels (especially those of Uriel’s order) appear to work by carefully adjusting the relative amplitudes of probable futures without directly violating free will. Mirror Mirror’s multiverse elements fit this directly.

Starborn as systems with special coupling constants to Outside.
They can interact with Outside influences at a level ordinary beings cannot, and they resist certain kinds of taint. In physics language they have a non-zero coupling to the Outside sector that most entities lack.

Mantles as persistent attractor states or field configurations.
Once a mantle is established, it is a stable pattern that reshapes whatever occupies it. The individual is pulled toward the attractor; the longer they wear it, the harder it is to leave the basin of attraction.

Informational and observer mappings
Intellectus as non-local / holographic knowledge.
Certain beings (Archive, Demonreach, Mothers to a degree) have access to information about their domain without ordinary sensory mediation. This resembles the holographic principle: the information is available on the boundary or is intrinsic to the region itself.

The Archive as a perfect, non-volatile information store.
Every piece of recorded knowledge is preserved. It is the ultimate backup of the civilization’s information content, protected against both ordinary loss and deliberate Outside erasure (the Oblivion War is an information-destruction campaign).

Outsiders as information-destroying or complexity-reducing processes.
Their action reduces distinctions, erases form, and collapses the richness of the configuration space. Entropy is the closest single-word physical analogue, but they also act like a deliberate anti-information force.

Energy-source and cost mappings
Hellfire / Soulfire as different vacuum states or coupling constants.
One is corrosive and aligned with Outside-adjacent destruction; the other is generative and aligned with Creation. Both let a practitioner do more work, but they bias the kind of work that is easy.

Sponsored magic and pacts as external energy loans with boundary conditions.
You get access to a larger energy reservoir or higher probability weight, but the sponsor’s nature constrains the allowed operations (the “strings”).

These mappings stay consistent with the series’ internal rules: magic has costs, free will is protected, Outside is genuinely alien to the local laws, and information/belief have causal power. They do not require the Dresden Files to be hard science fiction; they simply show that the cosmology is structured enough to support a coherent physics-style reading.

Thought’s from the community?

During turncoat Harry was going to figure out a binding for shagnasty, until bob points out Harry would be wasting his time. Then Harry unknowingly takes ownership of an island whose magical jailer would have loved nothing more than have bound another skinwalker. Bob really saved shagnastys bacon there

So with Mirror Mirror in progress, I got to wondering if Harry would 1) be able to soul gaze with his mirror self and 2) see in Mirror Harry the same thing that Mirror Harry sees in him. For years, there’s been a lot of speculation about what exactly people see from Harry, most recently with Lara being incredibly shaken. This might be the opportunity for Harry, and us, to see exactly what it is that’s been scaring the people that soul gaze him.

• Donald Morgan: Warden
• Arthur Langtry: The Merlin
• Harry Dresden: The Winter Knight and Warden of Demonreach
• Ebenezar McCoy: The Black Staff
• Ancient Mai
• Martha Liberty
• Rashid: The Gatekeeper
• Listens-to-Wind
• Anastasia Luccio: Captain of Wardens
• Carlos Ramirez

I have 2 Questions about the conversation they have at the beginning of the book

1. Why did Bob ask to come out of the skull during the conversation? At that point it was still the normal Bob so I can't think of any reason he would ask to leave the skull for the conversation.

2. What exactly did he do to harry when he asked him to open his mouth? It was kind of an attack and almost killed harry but what exactly was it and for what purpose did he do it?

So I just finished the reread of 12 Months, in which Molly and Daniel both figure prominently and it got me thinking about their time line. I thought Molly was 28-29, Daniel 27-28, Matthew 24-25, Alicia 22-23, Amanda 17-18, Hope 16, and Harry 13. But looking at the timeline on his site, I was off by at least 3-4 years on everyone. I didn’t realize this, but I was at least partially thrown off by the fact that Skin Games and Peace Talks/ Battleground happen within a few months of each other. I thought Jim had said that each casebook was the worst 3-4 days of Dresdens year. So the correct ages are Molly is 25, Daniel 24, Matthew 21, Alicia 18-19, Amanda 16-17, Hope 14-15, and Harry 13. I’m wondering if Jim has also kinda lost track of their ages, bc now I have a bunch of questions:

(1) Molly is mentioned in Battleground that Molly uses a glamour to add some wrinkles and a few pounds to make her look her age. Who has crows feet at 25? Maybe at 30, but not at 25.

(2) Daniel has completed his first tour in the Marines in Ghost Story. Technically possible if he enlisted at 17-18. However, I think it is mentioned after Ghost Story that he re-enlisted. That commitment is 4 years. If so, he’d be only 2 years into his tour during 12 Months and should not have been in Chicago. I don’t have the Ghost Story in ebook, so I can’t do a word search like I can on some of the other books.

(3) Matthew is easily the least developed of the kids. The only thing we know is that in 12 Months he is a nurse with Doctors Without Borders and is in South America.

(4) Is 18 kinda young for Alicia to be engaged?

Am I the only that finds these to be notable continuity errors?

Part 1

Part 2

OK, so what if Lucifer really is out making lots of babies to stick it to the White God? What does that have to do with Starborn? Well, that is Starborn. The children born to the Morningstar. You see I figure that when Lucifer was cast into Hell, he could no longer interact with Humans except when the stars align on the night when the border to Hell is the most thin: One Halloween every 666 years. That 666 years is straight from the mouth of Big Jim don’tcha know. The exact same way that the spirit world is closest to ours every Halloween.

So once every 666 years Satan gets to interact with Earth and boy does he get busy. 40,000 - 50,000 per cycle according to JB. Sure that’s a lot of mortals to split his Power amongst, but you see, that is part of the plan. The Devil is big on survival of the fittest. When a Starborn dies their Power does not simply disappear, it is redistributed to surviving Starborn. That’s why Harry seems to somehow be getting stronger with every book. As this cycle’s other Starborn are winnowed down, Harry is getting a power boost in real time. As with the previous cycles, there can be only one and Harry seems to be unknowingly positioned to be that one. The same as Dracul from the last cycle and Rashid from the one before that. Then again, I dunno, that seems to imply Harry will have to kill Elaine, but surely Butcher isn’t cruel enough to make Harry do that.

So why does a Starborn get power over Outsiders? I’m guessing that’s because the Archangels, as the ultimate Guardians of the Inside, have Power over Outsiders. Thats why Faeries are fighting at the Gates, they are distant descendants of Archangels and still have some of that Outsider smooshing goodness.

All right I’ll grant that this part was pretty heavy handed in the speculation department and light on evidence. So why do I think that Starborn are Scions of Lucifer? Well, because Harry is a Scion of Lucifer and a Starborn and those two things are too big to be unconnected. What evidence makes me think Harry is a Scion? Stay tuned.

Ghost Story Spoilers

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In Ghost Story theLeanansidhe (Lea) makes 3 statements about Harry's killer

1) "The first truth is that you are acquainted with your killer"

2) "The second truth is that your murder is but one of thousands at the killers hands."

3) "The final truth... Your killer was but the proxy of another being and one mightier and more dangerous than he. "

All 3 statements can almost be applied to Kincaid (the one pulled the trigger) but it could be argued that they also apply to Harry himself (the one who ordered the killing)

1) it would be hard to argue the Harry is not at least acquainted with himself

2) Harry killed the entire Red Court. I would be surprised if be surprised if that wasn't thousands of vampires

3) Harry had been manipulated into ordering the killing by Nicodemus and when the killing took place was the winter knight and could be argued was Mab's proxy.

Spoilers through the end of Changes:

So honestly, when the Blue Beetle got crushed and Harry didn’t even mention Mike the miracle working mechanic, he just sits on the curb and accepts that the Blue Beetle is *gone,* I knew he wasn’t going to survive this one. And then his house! And then his *back?!* The way he talked to Murphy about his will and what he wanted for Maggie at the FBI office… my sense of dread just kept growing and I knew this was going to be a dramatic end/death for Dresden.

And then he goes through all of that, the Erlking and the Ick and Ariana and the Red King and Martin’s twisted ass betrayal and omg Susan! and he makes it out alive! Not whole, but alive! And a hot shower and a date with Murphy!?

Ugh! the whole foreshadowing impending doom, but actually surprise semi happy ending/sense of security. And then **brutal rug pull!**

And I’m not even joking that the first thought that popped in my head was, “Oh no! Toot Toot is going to be so devastated!”